"I want you to see and understand Tante," said Karen. "And how much I love her; and why." They walked on, from the terrace to the cliff-path. Karen stopped when they had gone a little way and leaned her elbows on the stone wall looking out at the sea. "She has been everything to me," she said. "Everything." He was aware, as he leaned beside her in the mellow evening light, of a great uneasiness mingling with the beautiful gravity of the moment. She was near him as she had never yet been near. She had almost recognized his love. It was there between them, and it was as if, not turning from it, she yet pointed to something beyond and above it, something that it was his deep instinct to evade and hers to show him. He must not take a step towards her, she seemed to tell him, until he had proved to her that he had seen what she did. And nothing she could say would, he felt sure of it, alter his fundamental distrust of Madame von Marwitz. "I want to tell you about my life," said Karen, looking out at the sea from between her hands. "You have heard my story, of course; people are always told it; but you have never heard it from my side. You have heard no doubt about my father and mother, and how she left the man she did not love for him. My mother died when I was quite little; so, though I remember her well she does not come into the part of my story that I want to tell you. But I was thirteen years old when my father died, and that begins the part that leads to Tante. It was in Rome, in winter when he died; and I was alone with him; and there was no money, and I had more to bear than a child's mind and heart should have. He died. And then there were dreadful days. Cold, coarse people came and took me and put me in a convent in Paris. That convent was like hell to me. I was so miserable. And I had never known restraint or unkindness, and the French girls, so sly and so small in their thoughts, were hateful to me. And I did not like the nuns. I was punished and punished--rightly no doubt. I was fierce and sullen, I remember, and would not obey. Then I heard, by chance, from a girl whose family had been to her concert in Paris, that Madame Okraska was with her husband at Fontainebleau. Of her I knew nothing but the lovely face in the shop-windows. But her husband's name brought back distant days to me. He had known my father; I remembered him--the fair, large, kindly smiling, very sad man--in my father's studio among the clay and marble. He bought once a little head my father had done of me when I was a child. So I ran away from the convent--oh, it was very bad; I knocked down a nun and escaped the portress, and hid for a long time in the streets. And I made my way through Paris and walked for a day and night to Fontainebleau; and there in the forest, in the evening, I was lost, and almost dead with hunger and fatigue. And as I stood by the road I saw the carriage approaching from very far away